Ontario County team will research and prevent child deaths

Monday

Sep 9, 2013 at 12:44 PMSep 9, 2013 at 12:44 PM

By Megan Badger

Messenger Post

Since 2008, the Child Advocacy Center of the Finger Lakes has played an important role in identifying and preventing child abuse. Now, with a recently awarded state grant, the center will also work to review child fatalities in Ontario County.

New York state awarded the CAC with $48,145 to create a Child Fatality Review Team to research and prevent child deaths. The team will consist of representatives from 14 county agencies, including local schools and hospitals, law enforcement agencies, domestic violence agencies, Ontario County Public Health, Child Protective Services and the county’s district attorney office.

Assistant District Attorney Jim Ritts, who has been involved with the CAC as chairperson of the advisory committee, will represent his office on the new review team.

“It’s pretty neat. We’re excited to get the grant,” he said. “We (the CAC) largely acted as review team anyway, but now we’re charged with reviewing every child fatality, with the idea being to help families immediately and help the community generally with awareness.”

The review team will work to prevent deaths in children by educating the community about everything from bike helmets to child safety seats, Ritts said.

“All agencies involved are very committed to this work and to this team and to providing the best services,” said CAC Project Director Jennifer Brownell. “We felt we were doing very solid work on abuse cases and the next step was to look at child fatalities.”

In Ontario County, the mortality rate for infants is higher than for children, with most of those deaths resulting from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), Brownell said.

“In Ontario County we don’t have a lot of child fatalities,” Brownell said. “But whenever there is any kind of fatality, we want to prevent that from happening in the future.”

For children ages 1 to 17, the mortality rate is five in 100,000, according to statistics provided by the CAC. Statistics show there were four total infant deaths in the county in 2012, bringing the overall mortality rate for children ages 0 to 17 to less than 1 percent.

A large role of the Child Fatality Review Team will be community outreach and education. Part of this effort will be having a full-time family outreach coordinator on staff to carry out community campaigns and serve as a family advocate. Brownell said the goal of the review team is not to point fingers, but to bring people together to reduce those numbers and protect children in Ontario County.

The team will offer training to organizations on how to spot early signs of child abuse. The target group for training will be child protective services, law enforcement officers and mental health professionals.

“We don’t want to duplicate services,” Brownell said. “There are already tremendous services in this county. Our goal is to coordinate what is already happening and to be able to expand and enhance on that.”

Coordination is also a daily responsibility of the CAC, which brings together all the agencies and people involved in a child abuse case to streamline the process.

In 2012, the CAC received New York state accreditation and national accreditation through the National Children’s Alliance. Operating under the Partnership for Ontario County, the CAC does everything from on-site forensic interviews to medical evaluations.

“Any professional who would be involved in child abuse cases — both physical and sexual — we coordinate,” Brownell explained.

In the past, agencies acted independently on child abuse cases, making the process for the child longer and more difficult as the victim had to repeat his or her story multiple times for different people. Now, almost everything that’s part of the case can take place at the center, which Brownell says is designed to be a kid-friendly environment.

“Our goal is to reduce the trauma,” she said. “This is a means of having a team that all works together to reduce the trauma for the child and provide a better, more succinct investigation.”

To report abuse or to learn more about the Child Advocacy Center, visit www.cacfingerlakes.org or call the toll-free New York Hotline at 1-800-342-3720.

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